Hello all,I am retiring a working microwave oven due to rusted through places in the cooking chamber. Since I am a homebrew enthusiast I am wondering what parts would be useful to transfer to my junk box. Any suggestions?

I prefer to cook the ham whole, rather than cutting it into pieces. Otherwise the ham gets dried out in the cooking process. But if you've already cut the ham up into parts, you may as well remove all of the ham parts before disposing of the oven.

There are only about half the turns per volt needed on the power transformer windings to run without heating. But you can use the 220 volt pri jobs on 110 vac and then use a voltage doubler to get up into the 2500-2700 vdc range.

The glass door makes a great shielded window in the front panel of a large glass-tube amp e.g. 4-1000.

You can take the secondary windings off and either wind a filament transformer or run a one-turn loop of #4 through the core window and make a dandy spot welder for aluminum.

That was my reason for suggesting that two identical transformers are useful. Put the primaries in series, and parallel the secondaries. This will yield something around 1.0kV to 1.5kV DC, depending on load.

(Again, you must remove the magnetic shunt, and lift and insulate the grounded end of the secondary.)

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do have experience working with high voltage so I'm definitely keeping the tranny. Probably won't bother with the magnetron though since I'm an HF experimenter and don't have any microwave test equipment.

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